


confidence man

by thescrewtapedemos



Category: Buzzfeed: Worth It (Web Series)
Genre: Con Artists, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Cheating, Implied/Referenced Underage Relationship(s), M/M, Unreliable Narrator, cheating is not in reference to main ships, nonlinear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-29
Updated: 2018-03-29
Packaged: 2019-04-14 09:35:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14133306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thescrewtapedemos/pseuds/thescrewtapedemos
Summary: It's a con of some kind, for sure





	confidence man

**Author's Note:**

> the cheating is in reference to someone entering a relationship while in the process of escaping an abusive relationship. the abuse and underage is ONLY lightly implied, there are no details whatsoever and no one talks about it. please take care of yourself 
> 
> i don't regret a thing except that i was writing this in the hallway of my commencement. good fuckin yard. 
> 
> enjoy xoxo

It was supposed to be easy, which is laughable, which is so very laughable because it’s _never_ easy. It’s always the exact opposite of easy. It is in fact always _difficult_ , but it was supposed to be easier than this. 

He stares across an ugly laminate table at Adam’s heart cracking, the calm resignation of smudged glasses, and it should have been easier than this.

* * *

“Today we’re going to eat three separate cheesecakes at three drastically different price points to find out which one is the most worth it at its price,” Steven tells the camera and Adam hums from the back, a subvocal murmur that tells them they hit the mic like sweet gold. 

Andrew glances back at him and how he doesn’t look up at them because he can already see them through the camera lens, folded in on himself and remote and still present through the whole car. 

“I for one cannot wait,” he says. He knows Steven picked this out because Andrew had told him the memory of his childhood, his mom’s cheesecake cooling in the fridge, a low broken murmur in Steven’s ear in the dark of a shitty cut-price motel on the outskirts of Bordeaux, something to keep the shadows of the gendarmes at bay, something to stem the flow of Steven’s bloody nose. 

Steven knows him like the back of his hand, like an architect must know a church, the floor plans to a bank vault the night before a heist. Steven knows him like someone knows what they love obsessively; like Andrew knows him in return. 

They hadn’t always been this glorious but they’ve always been this _dramatic_.

* * *

The whole thing was supposed to be a fun scam to play while they put their dirty money through the laundry. 

All the money they’d ever need in neat Swiss rows of ones and zeros, funneled through warm Caribbean tax havens and ironed out in northern European neatness, the sum total of their efforts as an ever-growing number. Their bank accounts as the measure of when they’d leave the game, hide away in some Mediterranean chateau or whatever, whatever Steven wanted. Andrew always knew it was going to be Steven calling the shots in the end. 

This job had been meant as something to supplement the law of diminishing returns. Something to make up for how the excitement dwindled as the money grew. Something to keep their hand in, convincing a whole executive board to let them be the face of this new show, convincing them to fund their fancy dates. 

Meanwhile, exorbitant federal felony tax fraud. There’s a certain maniacal lack of symmetry to it that Andrew loves deep in his blackened little heart. 

And then they had been given a new long-term cameraman and Adam had grinned at them sleepily across a conference table and Steven’s fingernails were biting into his thigh and Andrew had known in some animal way that here, oh god, here there be incredibly big fucking dragons.

* * *

Adam closes his eyes around a bite of bacon and Andrew wonders if this is how normal people feel committing a sin. It feels indulgently wrong and impossible to look away from. 

He’s lovely. He’s not attractive in the same way Steven is, boyish and boundless, but there’s something there in the way he holds himself that Andrew wants to take apart and puzzle out like diamonds on jeweler’s felt. Fastidious to the point of pain, elbows tucked in close to his side and head down over his equipment. He looks soft. 

Andrew watches him and there’s a pang of something low in his gut shifting.

* * *

He hadn’t always been Andrew, as Steven hadn’t always been Steven, even though when they had met the man with his arm around Steven’s shoulders had called him _Stevie_ and kissed his temple like he thought he’d found paradise. 

Steven had watched Andrew sell his fiancé the moon and done nothing to stop it, a little cheshire grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. When the man had agreed to consider the proposal - as good as sold, Andrew knows his craft, he’s one of the best there is - Steven followed Andrew out the door and told him he was going to leave with him, both of them standing on the little white front porch of the house his fiancé owned. 

It’d been utterly worth it, the amount he’d spent on the last-minute second ticket on the flight out of that shitty little Florida hamlet. Steven is utterly worth all the trouble he causes, and he knows it, and he’ll never let Andrew forget it. Because sometimes he forgets it himself and needs reminding. 

“Stevie,” he’d whispered to the small of Steven’s back, shining with sweat, dim in the light of the hotel room’s bedside table lamp. The ink of the Steven’s fiancé’s signature is barely dry on the document that will consign a significant portion of his savings to Andrew’s pocket. There’s two ticket tucked into his laptop bag ready to fly them to Calcutta. 

Sharp nails digging into his wrist. Eyes flashing at him over Steven’s shoulder, dark and glittering. 

“No,” Steven had murmured, “Not Stevie.”

* * *

Before they are looking at Adam across the ugly laminate table: 

“It’s a fucking _risk_ ,” Andrew snaps at Steven. 

They’re fighting even though they agree, even though they both know the risks and they both know the costs and they both know the rewards and most importantly they both know the other is also all in. There’s no real question of conduct here. They’re as committed as they’ve ever been. It’s just a question of how hard to throw the game. 

“We can do it,” Steven says back, sure and almost conciliatory with it. He believes they can do it. He believes they can do anything. He might be right. 

“It’s still too much risk,” Andrew says, “We don’t need a bit camera dude, we should hold out for a rotating one. Someone that’s not with us every second of every shoot, it’s just _common fucking sense_.” 

“We can do it,” Steven repeats and that’s all he needs to say, anyway.

* * *

“I think I wanna fuck Adam,” he confesses into the drawn bow of Steven’s shoulder much later on, seven years after the first hotel room. It’s still a dim hotel room and when Steven looks at him his eyes still glitter. 

There aren’t any secrets between them. There isn’t room for them. 

Steven laughs, squirms around in the sheets and winds his limbs in the octopus sprawl he loves so much across Andrew’s chest. 

“You too?” he mumbles against Andrew’s breastbone, and this shouldn’t be where Andrew breathes out in relief, but it is anyway.

* * *

Both of them are too old for nightmares but if Andrew did have them, and he doesn’t, they’d be something like this: 

He wakes up one day and the bed next to him is empty. There’s one set of clothes in the closet and there’s shoes of only one size in the hallway and the door is unlocked and of course Steven wouldn’t leave a note.

* * *

A memory:

Neither of them are fantastic chefs but he wouldn’t give up anything for this, for a mouthful of deliciously sour wine and stir fry sizzling on the stove, something horribly bubbly in a language he doesn’t speak piping through the radio and Steven jigging in his arms like he has no idea what his body is for beyond this. 

This, this forever, he promises himself, this and everything else he can lay his thieving hands on. 

They are in Bombay and he’s had Steven for three months and he knows already to give himself up for a lost cause.

* * *

“We’ve got all the money,” Steven tells him. 

The laptop in front of him is a dinosaur, heavy and thick and cushioned at the sharp plastic corners with gel pads. Loaded down with encryption it had cost them a rather large fortune to acquire but necessary to monitor the web of minute transactions and the nesting dolls of false identities and limited liability shell corporations and patsy clients meant to filter their money down to be untraceable. 

All Steven, the genius of his quick fingers and knowledge of the inner workings of international business law. He looks up at Andrew now over the lid of the laptop. 

There’s a smudge of chocolate at the corner of his mouth. His fingers hovering over the keys, wrists an arch. Midmorning summer sun pours over his shoulders and through the peacock fan of his hair and it’s idyllic, almost picturesque, _portrait of the artist as an internationally wanted confidence man_. 

For the first time in months there’s something uncertain about his gaze. 

“We can go,” he says when Andrew doesn’t say anything, and Andrew still doesn’t have something to say.

* * *

Adam tells them things sometimes when the car is quiet and it’s dark outside or it’s been a long drive. What’s outside the car not mattering anymore because they’re all tired and none of them are really in their right minds, though it’s arguable any of them ever were. 

Little things. Little facts, little stories. His life spilling out into the silence, and Andrew is almost angry with it every time. Angry that it catches him off guard. Angry that he doesn’t expect it, doesn’t already know. 

“The place I grew up looked a lot like this,” or “When I went to college I lived off of ramen for three years, I was that poor,” or “I’m not a fan of yellow.” 

Little things.

* * *

“He’s a good man,” Andrew tells Steven. Steven laughs. 

“No such thing.”

* * *

Adam finds Steven first, which isn’t ideal but better than some of the alternatives. 

They try not to do Florida too often, which is pretty easy considering it’s on the other side of the country from where they’re dug in for now, but sometimes becomes necessary. 

Adam calls him and that’s rare enough Andrew picks up even though he’s in the middle of negotiating with a recalcitrant restaurant manager about how much they should pay for the meal they’re hoping to film. He almost doesn’t pick up except that Adam never really calls him unless it’s important. 

Steven had seemed fine, he’d been fine when Andrew had left them at the motel an hour ago. He always seems fine. 

“He wasn’t in his room” Adam tells him as soon as he picks up and Andrew shoves away from the table without looking back, ignores the manager shouting a question after him. He’s out on the street before Adam’s sorted through the stumbling syllables into his second sentence. “I found him, I, he won’t talk to me-,” 

“Where did you find him?” Andrew asks and he’s working to keep his voice even because if Adam’s with him then Steven will be alright eventually. He hadn’t wandered too far. 

“In the stairwell,” Adam says, and there’s a shifting noise. Someone is murmuring in the background, a wordless voice rising for a second. Steven’s voice. Andrew breathes out in a rush. 

“I can be there in like,” he glances around, he’s in downtown and the hotel is a twenty minute drive away if he obeys the speed limits and heads back inside to apologize to the manager, “fifteen minutes.” 

He finds them twisted up in the sheets of Adam’s room, Steven’s face pressed to Adam’s hip, his hand twining around Adam’s so tightly Andrew can spot his white knuckles from the door. Adam looks up at him when he gets the door open with a flinch like Andrew’s catching him doing something wrong. Eyes all pupil. A hand that comes up in supplication and shakes in the dim light of the bedside table lamp.

* * *

There are things he learns from close quarters. 

The way Adam takes his coffee. The kinds of foods he likes and the kinds he doesn’t but will soldier through anyway for the footage and the kinds he refuses to try at all. His style, which is… interesting, but not terribly impressive. Though that may have something to do with the Buzzfeed salary. 

He learns the way Adam smells, his laundry detergent and shampoo and a little bit of pomade or hair wax of some kind, an olfactory admission of vanity that Andrew cherishes just a little bit more than he should. He doesn’t care, has never cared. He learns that Steven, forgetting his own shampoo and borrowing Adam’s, hits him like a fist to the pit of the stomach. 

Steven laughs as he crowds him against the wall by their hotel room door, buries his nose in the crook of his neck and inhales greedily. His hands are just as greedy clutching at Andrew’s shirt, his back, the swell of his shoulders and hips. 

“Like it?” he breathes against Andrew’s ear and Andrew growls and bites down and he does, he does, he does.

* * *

He knows everything about Steven’s life until he turned fourteen, and then spottily until he turned sixteen, and then only two sentences until Andrew had walked in Steven’s door, aged twenty. 

“I met him when I was sixteen but we didn’t start dating until I was seventeen.” 

“I used to make brownies for him with that mix all the time.” 

He knows too much about the man Steven was going to marry. He keeps track of him and he tries to tell himself it’s for security reasons, to know if their cover is in danger, even though they both look so different now and have different names. He knows the man is thirty-two years old and Steven is twenty-seven. There are things he knows and things he can extrapolate, though he still isn’t sure what to do with the brownie mix.

* * *

Adam never asks them to explain anything, which Steven thinks might be the real reason he lasts long enough to establish himself. 

He never asks about the motel in Florida, though he has to have questions. Andrew knows Steven didn’t tell him anything because Steven won’t even tell Andrew anything, shrugs it away with a sideways look and a twist to his mouth so bitter it hurts to look at. He never asks about their families even though Andrew has dossiers of papers and stories he’d cooked up just for that. 

He gives Steven the aisle seat. He keeps an eye on Andrew when they get farther south than Tennessee. He suggests foods in his quiet voice, and Andrew watches him and thinks about what it would be like to pull him closer.

* * *

He doesn’t think that he’s necessarily a bad person but he knows that he is not a good enough person to tie Adam to him. He knows Steven doesn’t think of it in those terms exactly, thinks of it more as a matter of exit strategies and escape routes and who will have to go down with the ship in the end. None of that stops either of them from wanting. 

He holds out a bite to Adam and Adam takes it with tedious neatness, looks up through his lashes in a bolt of lightning and savors it like he always does, in total silence. 

Steven is laughing at him with his eyes when he looks over. He rolls his eyes back. They’ve already had the argument.

* * *

“We need to leave eventually,” Steven says. 

The laptop is still on their kitchen table. Andrew’s passingly familiar with the interface, can make out numbers in alternating columns of light and dark. They’re big numbers. He gave up on knowing the exact total when Andrew had started talking about asset transferal and risk isolation. 

He hesitates. 

“I know,” he says, far too late. “Sooner is better, right?” 

They look at each other and they aren’t saying anything but they are thinking about how there’s someone else in the room with them, another ghost. As quiet in his imaginary projection as he is in person. 

“He deserves the truth,” Steven says and it’s that more than anything that pushes Andrew into motion. Uneven steps to Steven’s side and then hands settling where they fall naturally, left at Steven’s waist and right catching his hand. Waltzing position, though it’s silent except for the traffic hum outside and the buzz of heat off cement. 

“It’s risky,” he says, which isn’t a no. 

“Yeah,” Steven says, which isn’t a solution.

* * *

Adam reaches out in the dark of the car and brushes his fingertips against the back of Andrew’s hand which is momentous because he’s never touched Andrew with any intent before. 

He and Steven are closer now, after the tight fifteen minutes he’d spent holding Steven together in a dim Floridian motel room. They touch, not with intent, but with some level of casual familiarity. Andrew knows himself enough to know he’s jealous but he’s wise enough to know it’s stupid. 

In the dimness of the car he turns his hand over and Adam’s fingers slip between his, soft and hot and a little damp with sweat.

* * *

Adam puts a whole energy into their shoot that they don’t expect, that _Andrew_ definitely didn’t expect. Their first together is an all-star hit of a video and he knows it from the first moment. He’s playing to an audience for once and that’s _always_ been where he shone the brightest. 

He’s playing to Adam and Steven knows it and he’s laughing about it and that helps too, it’s all kind of incredible, a little fantastic. 

It’s audio-visual gold and he doesn’t know how rare Adam’s broadest smiles are yet but he’s already aware he treasures them.

* * *

They pull Adam into the conference room and he’s already drawing his shoulders in close and watching them through his lashes like he knows the blow is about to fall. It _is_ about to fall and Andrew is already swallowing futile regrets because he knows this is the right thing to do. 

Adam’s braced like he knows how to take a punch. Andrew doesn’t know how he missed that. Elbows in, head down, all the important parts tucked out of sight where they can’t be damaged. They’d had a speech all ready, a crescendoing masterpiece of a misdirecting thing with enough truth to it to be bulletproof and enough lie to make it sweet to swallow. It falls apart in this fluorescent-lit cave of a room, under Adam’s gaze. 

“Is this about the shady shit you guys are involved in,” he opens with when neither of them know what to say. Andrew chokes on nothing. 

“I don’t,” he begins, an attempt at deflection, and then cutting himself off because they’d meant to _admit_ to this, kind of. His words hit the silence dully and with no fanfare. 

“I don’t know what it is,” Adam says. “I never, I didn’t try to find out.” On anyone else that voice would be measured, calm. They know better, Andrew can hear the way his voice shakes just a little. He’s trying to cover for himself. He’s trying to give them all an out. 

“We’re leaving,” Steven says, and Andrew wishes he were kinder but all he can be is relieved that he didn’t have to be the one to say it. “We wanted to tell you. They won’t find us.” 

Adam’s heart cracks. Andrew watches it, the microflickers of his expressions, the way his lips purse against a tremble, the way he blinks twice, rapid, to push away tears. There’s calm resignation in the smudged glasses. 

“Oh,” he says. His voice is steady. “Okay.”

* * *

It’s 2011 and the plane touches down in Calcutta. Steven’s hand is in his even though he’s asleep. His breath is heavy with vodka.

* * *

It’s 2015 and the plane touches down in New York. They have a layover before they hit Chicago on the way to Los Angeles and Andrew knows the perfect little dive of a diner he wants to take Steven to. He just found out Steven’s never tried deep-dish and Andrew’s no purist but he knows the best when it hits his taste buds.

* * *

It’s now, and the plane touches down in Mykonos. 

Andrew appreciates a cliche and he knows Steven doesn’t care, just as he knows that they won’t stand out here, just as he knows their assumed names are watertight and will start to feel natural around their shoulders soon enough. 

He puts Steven to bed in their little rented bedroom and walks the twenty minutes to the beach. The air smells of ocean and dead fish and revelry, freedom. The air echoes around him and he promised he wouldn’t give in to melancholy but there’s something about the weight of the dead history all around him that invites it in. 

They won’t be found here. Their covers are too good and there’s no one on their trails anyway, they’ve always been too good for that. He swallows that truth down and watches water beat against rock and pretends to himself that he isn’t wishing to be found.

* * *

“He’s a good man,” Andrew argues. 

“You keep saying that,” Steven answers him, sharp and mocking. They’re watching each other over the dinner table and it’s rare enough that they don’t agree that Andrew can’t even follow the thread of this fight. He just wants to walk away. He feels restless with it, twitchy, his hands wandering over the silverware, his toe tapping against the floorboards. 

“What is it you actually _want to do_ about it,” Andrew snaps back and Steven looks away. 

“It was time to leave,” he says and the fight goes out of Andrew all at once. 

“It was,” he agrees, because it was, because every moment they’d lived like that had been a stupid risk even though they’d loved every second of it. Even though they’d had Adam, kind of, almost.

* * *

“He’d love this,” Steven says, and takes another bite of quiche without looking at Andrew. He can’t even argue, because he knows who Steven is talking about and he knows Steven is right. He just looks down at the stuffed grape leaves on his plate and pushes at them fitfully with his fork.

* * *

He forwards the email with the ticket confirmation to Steven first because he’s not going to do anything without Steven’s support, no matter how tight his lungs feel or how his chest stings. They’re sitting at opposite ends of the couch and so he hears Steven’s email alert going off with a musical chime and he studiously doesn’t look even when Steven hauls in a short sharp breath. 

One ticket from Los Angeles to Mykonos. Brief layovers in Denver and New York. No attached message. 

“Send it to him,” Steven says.


End file.
